James Rollins - The 6th Extinction

Gray led with his weapon at his shoulder, flanked by Stella and Jason. Harrington followed, with Kowalski keeping up a rear guard. The professor eyed his daughter’s limp. The woman’s right leg remained shrouded by the severed coil of leafy vine. Her bottom pants leg was bloody.

“Do we need to take care of that?” Gray asked.

Harrington glanced behind them. The group had cleared a spur of rock, putting them out of direct view of the feeding frenzy. “We should,” the professor said, drawing them farther out of the way. “Over here.”

A slab of broken rock served as a seat for Stella. Her father gently unwrapped the vine, drawing bloody thorns, each an inch long, from her skin. Once removed, the muscular coil continued to squirm in the professor’s grip, but Harrington kept hold.

Following the older man’s instruction, Gray cut a seam along his daughter’s pants, then administered first aid using antiseptic and a bandage from a small emergency med-kit taken from the gondola.

“Do we need to worry about poison?” he asked as he worked.

“No.” Harrington lifted the length of vine. “ Sugox sanguine is no worse than kelp. Only a little more aggressive.”

“No kidding,” Kowalski commented.

Vine in hand, the professor moved toward Jason.

The kid took a step back.

“Hold still,” the professor said. “Let me see your face.”

Jason turned his cheek, revealing a black gash.

Harrington lifted the writhing plant. Bright red blood dribbled from the cut end. Gray eyed those thorns anew, horror growing.

Had that muscular vine been sucking Stella’s blood?

The professor tilted Jason’s head farther back and hovered a fat crimson droplet over the wound.

What is he—?

From the gash, a fat white larva squirmed out, stretching toward that fresh blood. The professor speared it with one of the vine’s thorns, pulled out the rest of its body, then threw the vine and the impaled parasite into the river.

Jason fingered his wound, his face sickened.

“Do you know about botflies?” Harrington asked.

Jason shook his head and looked like he didn’t want to know.

Harrington elaborated anyway. “ Cuniculux spinae are similar, a type of flesh-burrowing parasite. They burn their way deep into tissues and sprout oviparous spines.”

“Oviparous?” Jason asked, looking more pale.

“Egg-laying. The eggs hatch into carnivorous larvae that spread far and wide. After that, they mature into—”

“I think that’s enough of a biology lesson,” Gray said, saving Jason from more details, while helping Stella back to her feet. “Let’s keep going.”

Jason slogged beside Gray. They had been trekking for nearly forty-five minutes, but by his estimate, they had crossed no more than half a mile.

If even that .

“Not much farther,” Harrington said behind them, but Jason wasn’t sure if that was the truth or if the professor was merely trying to convince himself.

During their hike, the tunnel had been steadily descending, falling in a broken series of steps, each no more than a meter high. Waterfalls cascaded from level to level, echoing up and down the tunnel. They were able to follow the banks along the western wall, but a few times, it required winding past stagnant ponds or fording streams by hopping from rock to rock.

Yet, it wasn’t the terrain that slowed them the most.

Life down here continually pressed against their small party, like a steady headwind. The sonic rifles deterred a majority of the larger creatures. But with every step, something squirmed, crawled, or flapped around them. All the while, biting flies continued to plague them, oblivious of their sonic discharges, an ever-present nuisance.

By now, it seemed every breath burned worse than the last.

Every yard harder to cross.

Sweat soaked through his clothes. His eyes felt swollen and on fire under his goggles.

The only bright side was Stella had drifted closer to him, marching at his shoulder, each taking turns keeping his or her rifle up. Initially, she or her father would try to educate them about what they encountered, classifying various species, but eventually it boiled down to a simple question for each new life-form.

Kowalski asked it now. “Should we shoot them?”

Jason stared ahead. Their path was blocked by what could only be construed as flocks of featherless emus, their numbers easily topping two hundred. Each birdlike creature stood on tall thin legs, likely evolved for wading among the series of ponds that dotted the immediate area. A cluster of nests held speckled eggs the size of grapefruits.

“If you move slowly, they shouldn’t bother us,” Harrington said. “They have no natural fear of people. As long as you don’t get too near one of their nests, we should be able to pass unscathed.”

“And if we do piss them off?” Gray asked.

“ Avex cano have a flock mentality. They’ll attack en masse. See that hooked claw at the back of their legs. It’s used for gutting prey.”

“But mostly they’re docile,” Stella said. “Even friendly, sometimes curious.”

She demonstrated by stepping near one and holding out her hand. It hopped closer, cocking its head to one side, then the other. Only now did Jason notice it was eyeless. Small nostrils above a long paddle-shaped beak opened and closed.

She reached a little farther and ran her fingertips along the underside of that beak, earning a soft ululating noise from its throat. The sound spread to its neighbors, like a wave traveling outward from a pebble dropped into a pond.

Stepping forward, Stella followed those reverberations, easily passing through the flock, leading the way now. Jason was drawn in her wake, as much by the wonder of it all as his appreciation of the woman before him.

Nearby, an Avex stalked high-legged into one of the ponds, stirring up a phosphorescent wake in its passage, the glow rising from the thick jellylike growth floating atop the stagnant water. The creature scooped up a gullet full of that slime.

“They graze on those bacterial mats,” Stella said. “Very nutritious.”

“I’ll stick to a T-bone,” Kowalski commented, though he stared hungrily at the Avex flock as if trying to judge if they tasted like chicken.

The group passed unmolested, which perhaps is what made Jason let his guard down.

“Stop!” Harrington barked.

Jason froze. He had been about to step over a rock — only to have it sprout jointed legs, hard and chitinous, and scurry to the side. As it turned away, a curled tail came into view, tipped by a trio of six-inch-long stingers. From the glistening dampness to those spines, they must be venomous.

Harrington confirmed this by naming the scuttling creature. “ Pedex fervens .”

Or roughly translated: hot foot .

Stella waved him onward.

He continued alongside Gray, but much of the momentary wonder from a moment ago had dried up.

After another long slog across the next hundred yards, the tunnel fell one last time and dumped into a massive space. The group gathered at the mouth of it. The sheer size boggled the senses.

“We call it the Coliseum,” Stella said.

That was an understatement.

The roof was beyond the reach of their meager pool of IR emitters. The walls to either side yawned ever wider, stretching like open arms into the distance. The river they had been following broke into thousands of small creeks, rivers, and streams, turning the place into a massive stony delta. Farther out, large lakes reflected their lamps, revealing the shadows of darker islands.

But closer at hand, the handful of petrified tree trunks that they had previously traveled past became a virtual stone forest ahead. The specimens found here dwarfed the largest redwoods, but instead of being merely trunks, the trees in this gargantuan cavern were perfect stone replicas, including intact branches and tinier stems, weaving an arched, leafless canopy overhead.